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Hungry Hill: A Memoir, by Carole O'Malley Gaunt
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On a sweltering June night in 1959, Betty O'Malley died from lymphatic cancer, leaving behind an alcoholic husband and eight shell-shocked children—seven sons and one daughter, ranging in age from two to fifteen years. The daughter, Carole, was thirteen at the time. In this poignant memoir, she recalls in vivid detail the chaotic course of her family life over the next four years.
The setting for the story is Hungry Hill, an Irish-Catholic working-class neighborhood in Springfield , Massachusetts . The author recounts her sad and turbulent story with remarkable clarity, humor, and insight, punctuating the narrative with occasional fictional scenes that allow the adult Carole to comment on her teenage experiences and to probe the impact of her mother's death and her father's alcoholism.
- Sales Rank: #874917 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-01-31
- Released on: 2013-01-31
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Publishers Weekly
Playwright Gaunt was 13 when her father went out one morning to do errands with her seven brothers in the family car. He told her to let the priest in, if he knocked—neglecting to mention that the priest was coming to administer Last Rites to her dying mother. After the funeral, her father told her that since she was so tough, he'd rely on her to look after her brothers. This being 1959, no one discussed her mother's cancer or her father's alcoholism. Still, Gaunt already understood how her father's behavior changed after a few drinks, how his hangovers became more and more debilitating. Before long, he found another woman to marry. He knew the stepmother slapped his children too freely, that she was emotionally erratic, but he enjoyed having an adult drinking companion. When alcohol made a widow of the nasty stepmother, Gaunt and her brothers endured a few more years of her unpleasantness before they were old enough to escape their loveless home. The saddest part of Gaunt's story is her feeling that she spent her youth parenting her brothers and her irresponsible father: I was always a mother, never a daughter. In the end, Gaunt has written a poignant, heart-wrenching memoir. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Gaunt, the only girl of eight O'Malley children, breaks the silence of an alcoholic's daughter in this remarkably moving memoir, which begins when her mother dies of cancer in 1959. Carole, 13, feels responsible for her younger brothers, while her father, who increasingly turns to drink, does little to help. Unable to cope, he burdens his daughter with adult tasks, from leaving her alone with the priest as he administers the last rites to her mother to telling Carole to hold the fort and sending her off with a credit card to buy the new family sofa. Gaunt describes the often humorous details of her Catholic high-school days, but hidden among the good grades, disappointing cheerleader tryouts, and writing awards is the sad lack of her father's attention to anything she does, meritorious or otherwise. The siblings know his whiskey bottle is ever present, but they don't recognize his alcoholism until shortly before he drinks himself to death at age 47. Gaunt's poignant story is undoubtedly not unique, but it is a family history deftly, candidly told. Donovan, Deborah
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
This book should be placed in time capsules in Springfield, Mass., and all across the country. It's more than a memoir. It's a social document, a story of a family, a document on the human heart. Since this is an Irish-American family the ingredients are almost predictable: nuns, priests, sacraments -- and the battle with the bottle. What makes this book different is Carole Gaunt's wise prose. She writes with such compassion and understanding you'll look at your own family the same way.
(Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes and Teacher Man)
Hungry Hill is engaging and memorable.... One of the most endearing aspects of the book is its lack of guile and its feeling of authenticity -- it glows with honesty.
(Madeleine Blais, author of Uphill Walkers: Portrait of a Family)
Maybe the only thing stranger than the pain families inflict upon one another is the fact that one survives it. Carole Gaunt has made a beautiful story of all that, without a false note, a word wasted, or a flinch. One is grateful for this memoir and for the author who, as a child, kept her eyes open.
(Roger Rosenblatt, author of Lapham Rising: A Novel)
A vivid portrait of the transgenerational effects of alcoholism and a courageous response to the disease.... The book captures the essence of the isolation, fear, and sadness of a girl who, instead of having a childhood, lived a dilemma -- doing all the right things, being a good girl who realizes that everything she does she does alone or under an umbrella of shame and wishful thinking, living in a home overshadowed by the effects of alcoholism from one generation to the next.
(Maureen McGlame, director, COASA (Children of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse), Robert F. Kennedy Children's Action Corps)
To paraphrase Tolstoy, 'Happy families are all alike, but every alcoholic family is unhappy in its own way.' In this powerful memoir, Carole Gaunt writes of being the only girl in a family with seven brothers and an alcoholic father, following the early death of her mother. For those of us who also grew up around alcoholism, her story and insights are poignant and involving.... Reading about the author seeking out jobs so she would never have to ask her stepmother for money gave me a feeling of measured triumph in how the small choices an individual makes can lead the way out of family traps; looking for those jobs and deciding to look to herself for stability rather than to the crazy adults around her was the beginning of health. But the book also shows how dysfunctional families rob their children of trust and innocence way too soon, and how that haunts them in their later years. A moving story.
(Christopher Durang, author of Christopher Durang: 27 Short Plays)
This gripping memoir by playwright Carole O'Malley Gaunt is... extremely well-written as the author spent her childhood as a mother to her ailing mother, her brothers, and her father. No reader will remain dry-eyed with this sensitive account of growing up as the designated mom.
(Harriet Klausner Midwest Book Review)
Among the many scenes that Gaunt recalls vividly from those years growing up in Hungry Hill, an Irish-American neighborhood in Springfield, Mass., is one of a priest administering last rites to her mother. The loss of her mother, whom Gaunt hadn't been told was dying, was life-altering, for it immediately saddled the teenager with heavy adult responsibilities. With a touch of humor and a sense of pride, Gaunt recounts the strain of trying to mother her seven unruly brothers, one of them only two years old. Her hard-drinking father, who calls her 'a tough cookie,' seems indifferent to her emotional needs: In an especially insensitive move, he has the family doctor inform her of his upcoming wedding. Gaunt depicts her new stepmother, Mary, as a hot-tempered hypochondriac whose love for parties abets the father's already serious addiction to what he calls "Irish medicine." When he dies, Mary, now the caretaker of his brood of eight, blackmails the children into meeting her behavior standards by threatening to walk out on them. Not only does the author write movingly of her dysfunctional family life, she provides an achingly honest picture of a teenager hungrily seeking at school the approval she does not receive at home. Although her father had told her that college was only for boys, in the end she escapes Hungry Hill by making her own way to university. Gaunt, now a playwright, has interspersed in the memoir six playlets featuring herself as an adult. The three in which she confronts her father are imaginary scenes demonstrating what she would have liked him to know, but the others -- a sorrowful visit to her mother's grave, a compassionate, sadly disjointed talk with her heavily medicated stepmother in a nursing home and a revealing phone call to one of her brothers -- appear to be real events. The many full conversations are not transcripts of actual dialogue, yet they have the ring of truth -- as do all these recollections of the loneliness of a girl growing up first without a mother and then without a father.
(Kirkus Reviews)
Heat Wave: the summer's best books sizzle with glamorous women, intrepid adventurers, and family secrets...Those with an appetite for personal history will be gratified by Hungry Hill: A Memoir (University of Massachusetts Press), Carole O'Malley Gaunt's moving account of her mother's death, her father's alcoholism, and growing up with seven brothers in sixties Springfield, Massachusetts.
(Vogue)
Gaunt, the only girl of eight O'Malley children, breaks the silence of an alcoholic's daughter in this remarkably moving memoir, which begins when her mother dies of cancer in 1959. Carole, 13, feels responsible for her younger brothers, while her father, who increasingly turns to drink, does little to help. Unable to cope, he burdens his daughter with adult tasks, from leaving her alone with the priest as he administers the last rites to her mother to telling Carole to hold the fort and sending her off with a credit card to buy the new family sofa. Gaunt describes the often humorous details of her Catholic high-school days, but hidden among the good grades, disappointing cheerleader tryouts, and writing awards is the sad lack of her father's attention to anything she does, meritorious or otherwise. The siblings know his whiskey bottle is ever present, but they don't recognize his alcoholism until shortly before he drinks himself to death at age 47. Gaunt's poignant story is undoubtedly not unique, but it is a family history deftly, candidly told.
(Booklist)
Carole O'Malley Gaunt tells her story unblinkingly, without sentiment, leavened with humor and humanity.
(Tom Shea The Republican)
Playwright Gaunt was 13 when her father went out one morning to do errands with her seven brothers in the family car. He told her to let the priest in, if he knocked -- neglecting to mention that the priest was coming to administer Last Rites to her dying mother. After the funeral, her father told her that since she was so tough, he'd rely on her to look after her brothers. This being 1959, no one discussed her mother's cancer or her father's alcoholism. Still, Gaunt already understood how her father's behavior changed after a few drinks, how his hangovers became more and more debilitating. Before long, he found another woman to marry. He knew the stepmother slapped his children too freely, that she was emotionally erratic, but he enjoyed having an adult drinking companion. When alcohol made a widow of the nasty stepmother, Gaunt and her brothers endured a few more years of her unpleasantness before they were old enough to escape their loveless home. The saddest part of Gaunt's story is her feeling that she spent her youth parenting her brothers and her irresponsible father: I was always a mother, never a daughter. In the end, Gaunt has written a poignant, heart-wrenching memoir.
(Publishers Weekly)
Most helpful customer reviews
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
The Ring of Truth
By Andrea Sonn
This memoir could have been a wrenching tearjerker, but Carole Gaunt, who lost both her parents in her teens and raised her seven younger brothers, presents her story with journalistic sincerity. It is packed with details of coming of age in the early 60's and the exquisite detail has the absolute ring of truth. It compares very well to Molly O'Neill's "Mostly True: A memoir of Family, Food, and Baseball", and to Terry Ryan's "The Prizewinner of Defiance Ohio: How My Mother Raised Ten Kids on 25 Words or Less". It's an engrossing read.
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
A Tale of Spirit
By Francis J. Lynch
In the interest of full diclosure, I went to grammar school and high school with Carole. I knew many of the people and places in the book. I did not, however, know the details of her home life. I recall being in awe of the girl with no parents who appeared so together in High School. The book tells a much different story and gives me a much greater appreciation of her struggles and her success.
Carole mixes narrative with brief dialogues between her and her deceased parents, her stepmother, or her brother. These scenes are sometimes riveting. The scene with her stepmother in a nursing home is amazing, as Carole searches for some understanding of the past with a woman whose mental capacities are clearly gone. By the last of these scenes - a call to one of her many brothers - I wanted to leap in and ask dozens of questions while I had the two of them on the line!!
The book covers 1959 to 1963. Prior to JFK's death and the escalation of Vietnam, the "1960's" as we know them today had yet to begin. Our High School years were really an extension of the 1950's. "Hungry Hill" accurately captures attitudes, lifestyles, and social structures that were eroded or even swept away in the 10 years following our graduation from Cathedral High School. It gives a wonderful picture of the neighborhood in the waning days of America's Post-WWII euphoria. Carole is spot-on with her descriptions of the clergy, local officials and the other adults in our lives. Her description of our Senior Prom was both funny and sad.
"Hungry Hill" also tells a touching story of a child who had the inner strength to cope with some of the most devastating events a child can witness.
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
More Fascinating than Fiction
By Julia McDonough
I never met a memoir I didn't like, because the story of a life is more fascinating than fiction. With painstakingly vivid recall and acute attention to detail, Carole O'Malley Gaunt took this reader on a roller coater ride down memory lane. Irish-Catholic baby boomers will identify with Carole's upbringing, but very few of us can come remotely close to her tragic experiences.
The second oldest in a family of eight children, Carole compromised her adolescence to help raise her brothers and run the household after the untimely death of her beautiful mother. Even though the family was fortunate enough to employ outside help, the charming but alcoholic Dad did little to hold it together except to drown his sorrows in whiskey and Frank Sinatra songs. And if that scenario wasn't heartbraking enough, enter the wicked stepmother who would give anyone feelings of violence. Not long thereafter, Mr. O'Malley drank himself to an early grave.
Depsite the sorrow and dysfunction, this is a hopeful and triumphant story of a brave, bright girl coming of age during the Camelot years. Even though the author is a few years older than this reviewer, her memoir revived recollections of old-fashioned department stores, soda fountains, parks, proms, beaches, basketball games, Catholic high school activities, after-school and summer jobs ... and Elvis. I am very grateful that Carole kindly included an epilogue so that we didn't have to wonder what happened to her brothers. HUNGRY HILL deserves best-seller status and a sequel.
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